Monthly Spiritual Message, July 2026
By Fr Joe McKay OFM
“Ascend then, O my soul, and do not delay; direct your steps toward the summit of the mountain where God is revealed.” St Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and St Bonaventure (1221-1274) lived at the same time, taught in the same city, and loved the same Lord. They even shared roots in the same school: both studied and taught in Paris, where the great Franciscan master Alexander of Hales had shaped the theological air the whole university breathed. Bonaventure inherited Alexander’s own chair and his Franciscan spirit directly; Aquinas, a Dominican, was formed in that same Parisian world of debate and prayer, even as he was drawn more to the newly translated works of Aristotle. So, these two were not strangers working in isolation — they were almost classmates, shaped by the same city and many of the same teachers, yet they came out the other side with two different hearts.
It’s worth saying, too, that history did not treat them quite equally. Centuries later, the Church came to lean on Aquinas as its principal guide for philosophy and theology, especially after Pope Leo XIII commended him strongly in 1879 — partly because Thomism’s confidence in reason proved so useful for engaging the modern world. Bonaventure’s thought never disappeared, though; it simply found its true home not in seminary syllabi but in the living spirituality of the Franciscan family itself, carried forward in devotion, in wonder before creation, and in the daily life of men and women like the Secular Franciscans reading this today.
Their difference isn’t really about who was “right.” It’s about two different ways of relating to a God who is both utterly knowable and utterly beyond us.
Aquinas: God Known Through the World
For Aquinas, God is reached largely through the mind’s careful climb upward. Look at the world — its order, its causes, its beauty — and reason can lead you, step by step, to the One who must be behind it all. God is Truth itself, and the more clearly, we think, the closer we come to him.
This gives Thomas’s spirituality a quality of patient trust. The world is good and makes sense, because God made it and God is reasonable. Relationship with God, for Aquinas, has the flavour of friendship grounded in truth: you come to know someone, and knowing them rightly, you come to love them. Prayer and study are not rivals but companions on the same road.
It’s a steady, daylight kind of faith. God is not hiding from us; he has left his fingerprints everywhere, and a humble, attentive mind will find him.
Bonaventure: God Met Through Love and Wonder
Bonaventure begins somewhere else entirely — not with the mind climbing up to God, but with God already present, quietly shining through everything he has made. For Bonaventure, every creature — a sparrow, a candle flame, a stranger’s face — is a kind of love note from God, a “trace” of the One who made it out of sheer delight. The whole world is, for him, less a puzzle to solve than a presence to notice.
So, where Aquinas reasons his way upward, Bonaventure is drawn upward — by wonder, by beauty, by love. He doesn’t deny that the mind matters, but he insists that thinking alone can’t get us all the way to God. At some point, knowledge has to give way to love. He puts it almost as a warning: “Whoever is not enlightened by such great splendour in created things is blind.” For Bonaventure, failing to notice God shining through the world isn’t a small thing — it’s a kind of spiritual blindness. His most famous book ends not in an argument but in silence: standing before the crucified Christ, where the only thing left to do is to be still and love.
For Bonaventure, then, relationship with God isn’t mainly about understanding him correctly — it’s about falling in love with him, the way St Francis fell in love with “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon” and saw God’s tenderness in all of it.
What’s striking is that Bonaventure did all this as a serious academic theologian, not as a side hobby to his scholarship. He used the same rigorous tools of argument and distinction as any master of his day, but aimed them at a different finish line: where Aquinas’s arguments tend to end in a clearer grasp of what is true, Bonaventure builds his arguments to end in the soul being drawn toward God. His doctrine of exemplarism is a real piece of metaphysics, not just a pious image: every creature, properly understood, is a trace of the Trinity, so that careful philosophical analysis itself becomes a form of contemplation rather than a separate exercise from it. He even argued, with genuine scholarly care, that love can reach God in ways the intellect alone cannot — structuring his most famous work, the Itinerarium, as a deliberate six-step ascent that carries the reader’s heart, rung by rung, toward a final, wordless union with the Crucified.
At the very summit of the Itinerarium, after six careful chapters of argument, Bonaventure turns and asks his reader to let even understanding go: “seek grace, not doctrine; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not the study of lectures… not light, but a fire totally enflamed and transferred into God.” Having spent a lifetime as a rigorous academic theologian, he ends by telling us that the final step is not one more argument — it is love, catching fire.
This shows up, too, in how each approaches a hard moral decision: an Aquinas-minded discernment asks “what does right reason, formed by truth, show me to be the good here?”, weighing the decision with the intellect first; a Bonaventure-minded discernment asks “what is love asking of me here?”, trusting that a heart truly in love with God will be drawn, almost instinctively, toward the right path.
So, How Do They See Relationship Differently?
Put simply:
- Aquinas sees the relationship with God beginning in the head and flowing into the heart — know God truly, and love will follow.
- Bonaventure sees it beginning in the heart and drawing the head along with it — love God, and your eyes will be opened to see him everywhere.
Aquinas trusts reason as a gift that carries us toward God. Bonaventure trusts love and wonder as a gift that carries reason itself toward God. One is the patient theologian; the other is the contemplative in love.
How This Shapes the Way We Pray
These two ways of seeing God don’t just stay in books — they shape the very devotions Catholics still practise today.
A Thomist instinct tends toward devotions built on clear truth, careful words, and steady repetition: the Rosary prayed thoughtfully, the precise wording of the Catechism, Eucharistic adoration approached through reflection on what is truly present and why. There’s a love of doctrine prayed slowly — truth turned, almost without noticing, into love.
A Bonaventurian instinct tends toward devotions built on image, story, and the senses: the Christmas crib (which Francis himself popularised), the Stations of the Cross walked physically, step by step, meditating on Christ’s wounds, simple prayer before a sunset or a wildflower as if creation itself were speaking. Franciscan spirituality loves gesture and symbol — bowing, touching, walking — because for Bonaventure, the body and the senses are themselves doorways into love, not just illustrations of an idea.
Most parishes, without quite realising it, blend both. A novena said with careful, repeated words is Thomist in spirit; a quiet moment lighting a candle before an image of the Sacred Heart is pure Bonaventure. Neither is more “Catholic” than the other — they are simply two ways the same heart has learned to reach for God.
Why Both Matter
The Church needs both kinds of people. We need those who, like Aquinas, can patiently explain why faith makes sense, who can sit with hard questions and not be afraid of them. And we need those who, like Bonaventure, can stop in the middle of an ordinary day and notice that the whole world is shimmering with God’s love — who can lead others not just to understand God, but to fall in love with him.
Most of us probably need a little of both: a mind willing to think clearly, and a heart willing to be moved.
For us as Secular Franciscans, Bonaventure is naturally close to home. But Aquinas still has something to give us: patience with hard questions, and confidence that our faith can stand up to careful, honest thinking, not just warm feeling. And those who lean more Thomist have something to receive from our Bonaventure too — a reminder that no amount of correct doctrine matters if it doesn’t end, like Francis before the crucifix at San Damiano, in love.
The Feast Day of St Bonaventure is July 15th.
Further Reading
Delio, Ilia. Franciscan Prayer. Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2004.
Delio, Ilia. Simply Bonaventure: An Introduction to His Life, Thought, and Writings. New York: New City Press, 2001.
Gilson, Étienne. The Philosophy of St Bonaventure. Translated by Illtyd Trethowan and Frank J. Sheed. Paterson, NJ: St Anthony Guild Press, 1965.
Hayes, Zachary. Bonaventure: Mystical Writings. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1999.
Osborne, Kenan B. The Franciscan Intellectual Tradition: Tracing Its Origins and Identifying Its Central Components. The Franciscan Heritage Series 1. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2003
Williams, Thomas. Thomas Aquinas: A Very Brief History. London: SPCK Publishing, 2013.
Fr Joe McKay OFM
National Spiritual Assistant
